In 2012, Kamal Al-Fiqi was at the site of the AISS, overlooking the Nubia Museum, to carve his slab of rock. He was then one of the emerging sculptors participating in the workshop, having graduated from the sculpture department of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University, in 2006. Al-Fiqi was lucky to take part in this year's main event, having gained experience after he was granted the a two-week residency at the Egyptian Academy of Rome, Italy, where he was directly exposed to contemporary European culture. There he discovered there the history of sculpture in Egypt is still very inspiring to the entire world. In the last two years, Al-Fiqi had been carving basalt because it is available, easy to work with and uniformly black. “In Aswan,” he said, “the experience of carving granite and dealing with the light and shade of the stone itself has been totally different from basalt or iron. Here I also had an assistant and I used modern tools. In time I learned about what was suitable for my work in terms of colour, size and ideas.” Al-Fiqi's contribution to the AISS is the figure that stars in an installation he showed at the Nord Art International Fair in Germany entitled Demo(K)racy. It revolves around a number of people in chaos where newspapers are scattered everywhere around them; they are all the same figure repeated many times — at the moment they relinquish their unity, they go astray. This figure is his favourite theme and it emerged out of the dramatic developments that Egypt witnessed under the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Fiqi found himself obliged to create a piece of sculpture inspired by ancient Egyptian civilisation that corrects the fixes Egypt's deformed image. A metre tall and 90 cm wide and deep, the piece is an abstract human figure inspired by the Pharaonic figure of Ramses II. A teacher of sculpture at the Alexandria Faculty of Arts, Mohamed Sabri attended the workshop in the 18th AISS. This year he is thrilled to participate in the main event and to be in Aswan for the second year running. “As child,” Sabri says, “I used to create works of art from the sawdust in my father's carpentry workshop. Later both my father and my elder brother would buy me clay and colours, encouraging me to pursue my hobby.” Surprisingly enough, when Sabri completed his secondary education his father thought he should enroll in the Faculty of Fine Arts; he was so insistent Sabri was practically forbidden from choosing another course. He joined the painting department briefly before moving to sculpture because, he says, he became convinced that was what he was born to do. As a main artist for the first time Sabri took a formal approach, sticking with his maquette until the very end. Likewise the classicist end result: Sabri's work may look modern but it is inspired by Coptic, Islamic and Pharaonic art. “The new generations of artists follow ultramodern trends but I love to stick to my roots,” he said with pride. Once again ancient Egyptian civilisation is a major source of inspiration. In his piece, Sabri imitates the sitting posture in Pharaonic art, with the figure of the Scribe in the Egyptian Museum working as a model. Named Al-Shahed (The Witness), the work stands for the idea of seeing things happen from a stationary position. The figure is after all partly amputated, his head and legs sitting on a mastaba. In Greece, Sabri had created a huge work, A Music Concert, depicting the relation of the moving to the static. The present statue is composed of two parts: a base and a flying component on top, of it. He used red granite measuring 3.5 m, 1.1 m and 1.1 m. Before taking part in the AISS, Sabri had been to Aswan several times to carve granite; he believes that the AISS paves the way for emerging rock sculptors to have an international presence. Islam Ibada also teaches sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University; and he is at the AISS for the second year having attended the workshop last year. Last year he created a portrait. This year he rebelled against his genre of choice and, though making a portrait of his colleague Ahmed Moussa at his atelier, opted for a granite owl. This owl, he says, is the natural outcome of political upheavals in Egypt. It is inspired by the constant state of anticipation now prevalent among Egyptians. For Ibada, the owl is a bird that is always in that state — waiting for the right moment to catch its prey and able to fly away soundlessly. “My piece also resembles one of those hieroglyphs inscribed on the walls of Pharaonic temples,” he explained. Ibada's story with the art of sculpture started when he noticed a tiny bronze statue decorating a shelf in the house a child, together with a plaster portrait of the late political leader Saad Zaghloul that he kept in his pocket all the time. As a child, he was impressed by the idea that a man can create this little creature, then he started painting in his adolescence. He enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts; at the preparatory stage he would carve statues of people for which he was well paid. “I loved sculpture because it is tangible and after finishing a statue you feel that you have created something you can ‘embrace'...” The piece of rock he chose was huge (2.8 m by 1 m and 1 m), and this made the owl theme all the more tempting. “Birds as a theme are very recurrent in the work of artists such as Adam Henein and Salah Abdel-Karim, but I'm carving my very own owl in my very own style. I didn't adopt the organic form, relying more on the architectural approach in order to be closer to the style of the Pharaonic sculptor, not that of his contemporary counterpart.” This was partly due to visiting the ancient temples in Aswan last year. He tried out a number of blueprints before arriving at the final form. “The challenge this year is totally different from last year; the material is helping me but I have to respect its toughness, glamour, beauty, and in return it gives me all that I need.” Birds, he feels, will figure prominently in his next string of sculptures. Ibada says he is very satisfied with the location of the sculpture he created last year at the entrance of the Open-air Museum, hoping the commissar will place his owl at the highest possible level so that it looks perched to catch its prey. In his sculptures lies the conceptual difference between art and craft: Fabrizio Dieci strives to bring back a kind of sensitivity to stone that is little appreciated by some contemporary artists who prefer innovative materials to classic ones. This was Dieci's first visit to Egypt, so he seized the opportunity to visit the Great Pyramids and some of Aswan's temples and antiquities including the unfinished obelisk. However, he had already been to the Egyptian Museum of Turin in Italy. He had also worked on granite in Sardinia and in China though his favourite medium is Carrara marble, the white kind, because it is the material that suits his designs and expresses his ideas most brilliantly, he says. With marble he can create curves and fine lines that can't be accomplished in granite without breaking it. Dieci found out about the AISS ten years ago: “I met the founder of the symposium, sculptor Adam Henein in Abu Dhabi at one of his exhibitions, but it was not until last year that he invited me to come to Aswan. I was very busy then and when I met sculptor Naguie Farid in a symposium in Turkey he encouraged me to come so I decided this year to free myself of all other occupations including teaching at the university in order to come.” Dieci has been to many symposiums in other Arab countries but in Egypt, he says, he feels at home. “People are warm and welcoming and we can understand each other because we are all Mediterranean people,” he said. He is impressed by the Open-air Museum and believes it can be one of the very unique museums in the world with such an amazing landscape, but he stressed that it still needs a lot of work, “Those in charge of the museum should continue to gather more sculptures there and then work on showing them in a better way.” He would worry about this, being someone who strives to create a relationship between a geometric part and an organic one in the same piece. There are two entities and a relationship between them, he explains, such as a man and a woman and how they connect. Sometimes Dieci delves deep into the fourth dimension of his piece: the energy coming out of the 2.5-tall slab of granite he chose inspired him to carve a blossom growing up and endeavouring to set itself free but there is something always suppressing it so it is still in the moment of struggle. The work is about reaching a compromise between spirituality and materialism, and it tells about the state between the moment of birth and complete freedom.” Dieci's saga with sculpture started when he was a child in Colonnata, a small village in the Apuan Alps, where he found marble right next to him because he belonged to a family of quarrymen and thanks to his block-squarer grandfather who taught him marble's secrets, “I used to see a lot of sculptors coming to this place to carve magnificent pieces of sculpture and as a little child I was very surprised about how a man can create a bottle from such tough stone.” At the age of 22, he learned at the hands of a veteran Italian sculptor who was friends with Picasso and Brancusi, “I wanted to be a sculptor ever since.” Dieci has exhibited in Italy, Germany, France and China. He has works on show at public places in Montbrison, Caorle and Venice; his Carrara marble statue named “Lovers” at the amphitheatre of the museum of Modern Art Ludwig Forum, Germany. For the first time at the AISS, two sculptors from the Netherlands, Chris Peterson and Ton Kalle, worked together on a single piece of sculpture. Peterson knew about the AISS for a long time ago because it is well-known in sculpture circles and he had many friends who had participated in previous rounds, including Kalle. “It is hard to ignore the Aswan symposium because it has been held for around 20 years now and I heard about it 10 years ago.” Peterson applied in 2010 but it was then thought too difficult to implement a collaborative project and the outbreak of the 25 January revolution in 2011 stopped him from coming. Finally, he participated this year and he is implementing a co-project with his close friend. Peterson says it was Kalle's ideas; he had worked collaboratively with architects and composers but not sculptors. “I love people to enter or leave my piece of sculpture, to interact with the piece in a way that makes it raise questions. I love to create a space in a contemplative sense, but Kalle is more inspired by nature. He composes many of his works in an elementary sense such as stars which shows he is more ‘naïve'. So there is no conflict between us...” Peterson compared the AISS and the other symposiums saying that there are common things such as the stone. “I've enjoyed it here,” he said. “It could be the climate, the country, the people, the colours; it is very small ingredients that make it a good symposium and make each experience different from the other,” he disclosed. Granite is Peterson's favourite stone and sometimes he carves basalt because they are the best stones for outdoor sculptures particularly in the Netherlands where the rain is very acidic making works vanish after several years; it is easy to obtain imported stones from Germany and China, he explained, because there are no stones in the Netherlands. This work is named Star Structure and is made up of three parts: a vertical part with a doorway in the middle, a black piece looking like a star which will be polished to become the active piece, and a back end with a door creating space in between. Peterson added that the walls are soft and can be interpreted as a house with walls and a table in the middle. There are 6 m between the star and the first wall and the same distance between the star and the end wall: a wide area. It is planned that this big co-project will be on permanent display at the Open-air Museum. “I was interested first in poetry writing and photography,” Peterson recounts. “Then I discovered that carving granite is very challenging and requires a lot of patience which I actually don't have; in time I became more patient and realised that I can leave a heritage for people to see and appreciate. I also discovered that sculpture and architecture are interrelated so I always like to combine sculpture with other disciplines...” For his part Kalle is rather more focused. “I try to bring out the language of stone in its most elementary form,” he says. “This raw material of mother earth needs to speak. It takes quiet, silence and simplicity. These elements are always present in my work.” This is his third time in the symposium; he was in Aswan in 1998 and 2005 and he believes the difference between the past two rounds and this one is the absence of Henein who used to be there all the time. Now sculptor Nagui Farid is in charge. He added that even the assistances have developed through the years: first they weren't able to use the carving tools probably but now they have learned from the foreign sculptors how to polish the surface and are competent enough to travel to other symposiums and work as professional assistances. “I am proud of Mahmoud Al-Dewahy, who was Adam's assistant for years and is now an accomplished sculptor who has held several solo exhibitions.” Kalle pointed out that Egyptian sculptors are good but lazy, their foreign counterparts being more diligent. Egyptian artists keep their distance from the assistant, but Kalle prefers to work closely with the assistant, “You can learn from your assistant; for instance, I went five times to South Korea and workers there taught me a lot.” He explained that whenever he meets Egyptian sculptors in other international symposiums they are unable to use the tools without an assistant's help — something he feels is a problem. Concerning his point of view on the Open-air Museum, he said that it is overcrowded and those in charge of it should rearrange the works or stop showing more sculptures in the same place and think about scattering them across Egypt's different governorates, public areas and squares. Kalle's favourite stone is granite because it is tough and not dull and delivering a message in granite is stronger than marble which is soft and widely used in figurative Roman statues. According to Kalle, his co-project with Peterson entitled should be displayed on top of the Open-air Museum in a newly created spot where the Nile is in the background. The work for him reflects the life of ancient Egyptians from dark to light and the trip from day to night. The work is a mix of architecture and nature; it can also be interpreted as a ship that makes its journey from darkness to light and looks from above like a star.
